SONET

SONET

The exploratory project SoNet

SoNet (short for Social Networking) is a research unit at FBK Foundation (Trento, Italy). See who we are

The research is focused in two directions

Theoretical research on social networking

Our research focus is on modelling social networks, studying their evolution in time and which incentives and strategies are needed in order to keep them lively and successful. This is done both on social networking services available on the Web (Facebook, Linkedin, Flickr, Wikipedia, ...) and on ad hoc services created by us. Currently the main focus is social networks among Wikipedia users (Wikipedians). We are also interested in studying the impact of online social networking sites in the real life of people, for example analyzing impacts on their social capital.

Applied research on social networking

We aim to create social networking services in order to study social networking under controlled conditions and to transfer research and technology into something useful that can benefit our territory. We believe in open source and we tend to release all our prototypes as free and open source software. Utilizing Web2.0 tools inside our research institute FBK (sometimes this is called Enterprise2.0).We are investigating how tools such as Widgets, Mashups, Wikis, Shared calendars, Internal messagging change and improve the way people interact, collaborate and share knowledge.We have released Taolin, the tool we are creating and testing internally in FBK, as Open Source. Please visit theTaolin homepage. We also deploy and study social networking sites for specific needs for example for Trentini nel Mondo association.

Current projects

We tend to release the software we developed as open source, so you can check the Software section too.

Trustlet is a cooperative environment for the scientific research of trust metrics on social networks.See http://www.trustlet.org

Dycapo: research on Dynamic Carpooling (people sharing the same car) and its implications for social networking and social capital. See http://www.dycapo.org

Datasets and source code

We try to release all the datasets we use for research so that other researchers can verify, replicate and improve our analysis. We try also to release as open source the scripts and software we write so that others can re-use them.

Current projects

and source code</h2>

We tend to release all the datasets we use for research. We tend to do the same also with scripts and software we write.

You can find both datasets and source code at <a href="http://sonetlab.fbk.eu/data/">We tend to release all the datasets we use for research. We tend to do the same also with scripts and software we write.